


The Collections

by Liberte_Egalite_Broadway



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Episode: s01e16-17 Peter Nureyev and the Angel of Brahma, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, I had Emotions about Mag, Metaphors, so I wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 23:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20750399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liberte_Egalite_Broadway/pseuds/Liberte_Egalite_Broadway
Summary: A look at Peter Nureyev throughout his early life - featuring deadly authority figures, a gentle father figure, and hats.





	The Collections

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt I received on tumblr. 
> 
> TW for violence and canon abuse of authority.

It takes hours of whining, pleading, and fighting against all opposing arguments (”What if you were caught and executed by a laser? How could I live with myself?”), but eventually Mag agrees to let Peter steal something on his own. He comes back into their hideout triumphant, cheeks flushed, the prize clutched in his hands. 

“A hat?” 

“A _great _hat,” Peter corrects. Many of the businesspeople who come to Brahma stop at a cafe only a short highrail ride from their hideout, and all of them wear suits and hats like the one in his hands. Outfitted in a suit of his own, it was all too easy to blend into the crowd and snatch one without meriting a second glance. Mag chuckles.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Hang it in my room.” Peter tosses the hat into the air and catches it on his fingertips. “It’s a trophy. It’s my first heist!”

He’s twelve then; too short to reach the spot where he decides to hang the hat, too proud to let Mag do it for him. He drags over a chair and pounds a nail into the wall while Mag watches, nervous that he’ll hit his fingers. The hat hangs on his wall for three months. Then something goes wrong, they have to move, and it, along with everything else he owns, is left behind.

**

Louis Bisset wears a ridiculous hat. It’s shaped like a disc and perches at a precarious angle on top of his mess of red curls. When he’s painting, it sometimes flops down in front of his bright cornflower-blue eyes, and he’ll push it back up with the end of his brush. If his brow furrows, it dips lower, like a boat bobbing in the waves. He’s handsome when his brow furrows.

Peter’s smitten. 

“I’m in love,” he announces while Mag sits on the floor counting out stacks of creds.

“Is that so?”

“_Yes_.” He sighs and flops back onto the moth-eaten sofa that they found on the curb a few weeks ago. “I feel like… Mag, I’ve never felt like this before. Not ever. I _know_ I’m in love.” 

“Fascinating. What is this mysterious suitor’s name?”

“Louis,” he sings.

“Louis as a boy’s name, or a girl’s -”

“I’m don’t like girls!”

“Right, right. I knew that.” Mag sets down the cash and turns around. “So Louis the boy, then. How did you meet?” 

“Oh, we haven’t met.” Peter kicks one of his ankles against the ceiling. “He doesn’t know I exist. But I’ve seen him in the square _every day_ and today I’m going to actually talk to him.” 

“Hmm.”

“And then he’ll see how in love with him I am, and then we’ll kiss and it will be _perfect_.” 

Mag doesn’t seem to share Peter’s excitement. “Hmm,” he says. “Are you sure this is safe, Pete? When you’re young, you feel lots of impulses that -”

“Oh god, Maaaag, you’re so embarrassing.” Peter grabs an apple and hops out the door. “Now I’m leaving to go confess my love. I’ll see you soon.”

Soon, it turns out, is early the next morning, when he crawls back through the window of their hideout holding a hat. The hat of a boy who admitted he had, in fact noticed Peter in the square. A boy who revealed AFTER everything was over that he would be leaving Brahma the next day. But here, he said, take this hay to remember me.

“Everything alright?” asks Mag. He’s sitting at the kitchen table across from the window; probably he knew Peter would come in that way. 

Peter slams the window shut. There are tears in his eyes. “No, it is not alright. He lied to me! I’m never going to love anyone again!”

“Now that’s a bit much.” 

“It isn’t! He took my heart and only gave me this stupid stupid hat and YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL!” He flings the hat down and storms off to his room in tears.

Peter’s thirteen, and this is the first time he’s cried since he was six. When he emerges from his bedroom to grab a bar of chocolate (chocolate fixes most problems), Mag has gotten rid of the hat. Peter never says it, but he’s grateful. He didn’t want to look at it a second longer. 

**

Pickpocketing. 

That was the crime. 

A girl, maybe two years older than Peter, with dirty clothes and a somehow goth black hat. She tried to rob him while he was walking back to the hideout, brandishing a knife as she shouted, “Give me your money!”. He could run, of course. He could probably take her in a fight, if it came to that. 

He didn’t get the chance. 

She planned it badly; he saw that immediately. There was a streetlight nearby. Her voice was too loud. When the laser fired from the sky above, it pierced neatly through her hat and clove down to the ground, and she toppled to the ground in two different pieces. 

Peter managed to make it home without screaming, but once he fell through the door of their hideout (not even risking the window) it all came out.

And now he’s been sitting here on the floor, shaking against the front of Mag’s tear-soaked jacket, like he’s a child again. 

“What if that happens to me?” he gasps. “What if that happens to _you_?” 

**

Three things change very dramatically very quickly.

First: he’s taller. Almost two feet taller. Taller than Mag. He trips over almost everything and he feels out of place and he can’t believe this is the cursed body he’ll have to contend with for the rest of his life, and also he can’t wear heels anymore.

Second: his voice is deeper. Smoother. It suits him, he thinks.

Third: his hair will suddenly not do anything he wants.

Combs get caught in the tangles and break. He tries to braid it back and the hair ties snap. Mag grabs a pair of shears, sits him down at the kitchen table, and lops it all off. Doesn’t work. Now it just has more angles to stick up at.

This is where the beanie comes in. He’s seen people around the streets wearing them, and they don’t fit his style exactly, but desperate times call for desperate measures. So, the next time Mag raids a department store, he grabs one for Peter and brings it home. It doesn’t erase his hair problems, but it does a good job of hiding them. He decides that’s good enough.

Peter decides to spite his ridiculous six feet and wear the heels anyway, and he thinks it makes him intimidating. He practices dozens of new accents and records himself saying them. He steals nine more beanies in different colors and matches them with his outfits.

He’s nearly fourteen, he’s a criminal, and he’s somehow still alive.

**

Mag knocks on the door while Peter is painting his nails. 

“Password?” 

“Come on, Pete-”

“_Password?”_

He hears a sigh from the other side of the door. “It’s ’Mag is an idiot.’”

“Correct. You may enter.” He holds up one manicured hand as Mag steps through the door. “Do I have time to do a second coat before we leave?”

“Probably not. You can do it when we get back.” 

“Alright, then. You still haven’t told me where we’re going.” They’ve been expanding their perimeter these past few days, hitting stores and banks a distance from their hideout to throw off the constables. Neither of them wants to move for what would be the fifth time this year. 

“You’ll see when we get there. But first -”

Mag has been holding his hands behind his back. Now he moves one forward and tosses something across the room - 

“A fedora?” Peter catches it in the hand without wet nails. “The fedora I was looking at earlier this week.” 

“Happy birthday.” 

He’s fourteen, and he’s been saying he’s too old to hug his father figure. Now he hops up and does it anyway. 

**

“The constables are employed by?” 

“The New Kinshasa government.”

“And they’re armed with?”

“A baton, a plasma knife, and two high-power laser pistols. Oh, and pepper spray.” 

“Very good, Pete. And they wear?”

“Black single-breasted jackets over black slacks with red stripes up the side - white for higher ranks.” 

“And?”

“And… damn. I know this.” 

“Take your time.”

“Flat caps! Red ones with black trim.”

“Excellent! I don’t think you’ve missed anything.” 

It’s still at least a year out, but already they’ve started planning for it - Mag’s great heist. The mission to take down New Kinshasa. 

The one that will make everyone remember his name. 

Mag sits down next to him and rustles his hair, mussing it into those sloppy angles it still goes back to sometimes. “I,” he says, and there is love in his eyes. “Am so proud of you, Peter.”

“Yes, yes, now stop getting sentimental, old man.” Peter rolls his eyes and ducks away. “We have more to go over! Are the caps wide brim or flat?”

They’ll all know his name.

**

The room is the color of the hat is the color of the blood on his hands and the blood on the body at his feet.

He makes it of the reactor room. Kills a constable, steals their uniform, and makes it out of the building. 

When he gets to the hideout, he doesn’t bother to climb in through the window. There’s nothing he can take with him that he couldn’t just steal on the way to wherever he’ll go next. Anyway, he has a fake ID in his pocket. He has a knife, and once he washes off the blood -

Once he washes off Mags’s blood - 

\- then he can use it again. And he’ll have to. 

In the lining of his vest, he has a small roll of cash, a pack of cigarettes, and a book of matches. Now he pulls out the loose threads and grabs the latter of these. He doesn’t stick around to watch the hideout burn.

The boy that pulls the cap low over his face as he turns away is sixteen. 

The name he was before is turning to ash behind him. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come shout about Mag with me on Tumblr: this-is-a-podcast-fanblog.tumblr.com


End file.
